Where's the Beef

Where's the Beef CAMPus?

Well, in Mallorca, of course!
This weblog covers most of the topics of my "Where's the Beef" course - mainly a one-day course. More than 200 professionals have participated in one of these courses over the last 18 months. Here's the announcement of a new version: a week-long training camp:Click here to read more

Commercialisation CAMPus Workshops: 5 days of practical work in Mallorca in March and April 2006

“Where's the Beef” – the course and methodology on Evaluation of Commercial Potential in Inventions and Innovation projects - has been offered to many groups over the latest five-six years. The format is a one-day course covering cases, background theory and methodology, but little time for real exercises and discussion.

Based on feedback, I have developed the concept of Beef CAMPus, a whole week concerned with building your own clear-cut action plans about how to commercialise a portfolio of concrete cases. How to build the business case of your own Technology Opportunities, and, as usual, a lot of learning.

Beef CAMPus will be offered on the island of Mallorca, which, apart from its natural beauty and friendliness, is easy and cheap to reach from almost anywhere in Europe. Together with local partners we offer the best training facilities.

The course is developed and managed together with Jacob Bar, the creator of the JBEngine.

NEW: Since Spring 2007 we have re-designed the format - have a look at our new BeefCAMPus website

EU Research Programme Design

On TII's Innovation Journal I have written an article about how to improve the prospects for commercial success of EU funded projects under FP VII. The basic point is about how the commercial success of a research result mainly depends on the quality of the research- and how I believe that quality in research can be greatly improved by using better peer review in the design of the research project. In short: make better/more literature studies by peers to make sure that research projects are not redundant but that they add genuinely new knowledge. The "publish-or-die" syndrome works against this, because we would get less pages per year fro academia, but nevertheless...

My second point is to leave the researchers alone so they can concentrate on what they are good at. Why must EC funded research projects involve SMEs or industrial associations or members from at least x countries if it doesn't add value to the quality?

The third point is about the use of "accompanying measures consortia" to do all the necessary exercises to ensure better commercialisation.

This is where the topic of this blog becomes interesting. The skills in Beef work are exactly what could/should be employed in the support of better research and better chances of commercialisation .